I took this shot of a guy playing pool after a gig at the Old Western Saloon in Point Reyes Station, CA. I was using the 85mm f/1.8 because the light in the bar was dim. Shallow depth of field was my game, solids was his. Unfortunately for him, he had no shot.

OK, so I’m on a faux HDR kick. No doubt it won’t be long before I’ll dial back it back, but for now I’m having fun tweaking with abandon. Interestingly, not all images lend themselves to this kind of heavy processing–especially when going for a “painterly” look. This one, taken this past weekend while out for Mexican food, took the process quite nicely.

For fun here’s the original JPEG image as captured in camera (the image above was made from the RAW file with most of the processing done in Lightroom 4):